4E Campaign - Session 5 - Barrow of the Ogre King

The Barrow of the Ogre King from FRCG was the primary basis for tonight's adventure. I was plesantly surprised to figure out that the dungeon tiles I owned, but had never used, matched perfectly with the maps in the FRCG for this adventure. That was fun!

Most of the encounters worked out well. Of note, the two fighter party works very well in "tight quarters". We got to experience cleric's turning for the first time, which everyone was impressed by. It is powerful, but not overwhelming, and as an encounter power, not a lock down for the entire encounter. The players got a nice bump by having two encounter powers now at 3rd level, not overwhelming, but noticeably cooler. In addition to the turning, the ranger's Disruptive Strike was used extremely effectively in the combat.

So once the party gets through the encounters at the top of the Barrow, the party is to descend through the ancient dwarven ruins to find the High Shaman. I thought this would be an excellent place to add a "combat/damage" oriented skill challenge. I made it a complexity 4, level 4 skill challenge. This worked out really well, and the party told a very funny story, and we had a good laugh, in addition to it being a very tough encounter. The mistake that I made was I went with the DMG listed DC's, having thought that we were going a little easily through past skill challenges. We agreed after, to stick with the errata difficulty classes. In this way, the PC's didn't want to feel like they would be "gaming" the system to get as many "aid another" situations as they could dream up.